Neville Mlambo, 65, a retired missionary, shakes his head. His United Church of Christ in Zimbabwe (UCCZ) church had educated a number of the finest Black ministers, CEOs, bishops, and judges within the last 100 years when Western colonialism and the church landed together in Zimbabwe.
“Colonial church-owned schools were prestigious. They groomed the cream of Black army commanders or city mayors,” said Mlambo. “Twenty years ago, we’d overflow with 1,000 students squeezing for a spot to check at our mission boarding schools. Today, we hardly attract 350 in some schools.”
Historic church-run mission schools in Zimbabwe—affiliated with a variety of traditions, including Anglican, Catholic, Presbyterian, Dutch Reformed, Baptist, or Salvation Army—are actually on the decline.
“They are losing money, students, and the following generation of congregants as more Black families troop to personal secular schools,” he said.
Zimbabwe has one among Africa’s highest literacy rates: 97.1 percent of the population in urban areas are in a position to read and write. Its educational system has included a mixture of free state schools, plus hundreds of Christian seminaries, primary schools, high schools, and colleges. The Catholics, Anglicans, and American Methodists have vast tracts of lands in Zimbabwe and dominate ownership of missionary-led schools.
“Christian mission schools took off within the Twenties because the colonial project deepened together with a have to train clerks, teachers, nurses, or judges that served the colonial conquest. That story is unwinding today, fast,” says Edgar Shuwa, a theology lecturer at Rusitu Bible College, which is run by remnants of the American Baptist mission in east Zimbabwe.
There’s an explosion of secular private schools owned by Black entrepreneurs across Zimbabwe today, says the federal government. Nearly 500 private-owned primary and high schools were operating within the capital, Harare, in 2022, with authorities battling to even distinguish between licensed and unlicensed ones, said Zimbabwe’s education minister in April.
After Zimbabwe gained independence in 1980, just about all students attended low-fee public schools run by the federal government and personal schools run by Christian denominations. But within the last 20 years, more parents have turned to secular private schools, citing a decline in teaching quality and facilities in older schools. According to UNESCO, 29 percent of all schools in Zimbabwe are actually privately run.
Church mission schools have run their course, in accordance with 45-year-old Marlon Danga, who studied on the famous Catholic Kutama Mission, where Zimbabwe’s first Black prime minister, Robert Mugabe, was schooled by Jesuit fathers. Danga sees their strict doctrine-based curriculum as outdated as culture liberalizes.
“Like many Black parents today, I went against the script when it got here to my offspring. I sent my kids to secular private schools that teach no adherence to any religion,” he said.
New money is empowering Black families to chop ties with schools run by colonial churches, says Stella Ngomwa, 49, a finance manager for a brewery. More Africans—in Zimbabwe and across the continent—are working to detangle their institutions and identity from Western colonialism.
“It’s a seismic shift, and we have now lost,” pastor Mlambo said. “Less money coming from mother churches in America or Scotland means—for old churches like us Baptists, Methodists, or Anglicans—that we are able to’t adequately maintain our schools’ infrastructure or dole out more scholarships to poorer Black students. And we’re losing appeal.”
With the rise of African-initiated churches, “the brand new African not only desires to own the church, he/she also desires to own schools, cities, land, identity,” wrote Yasin Kakande, writer of Why We Are Coming: Slavery, Colonialism, Imperialism, and Migration.
Church-run mission schools dominated the colonial heyday, but the truth is that Black Zimbabweans lacked options, Ngomwa explains.
Now, the country’s Christian landscape is changing. More believers church-hop between denominations, moderately than maintaining a powerful identity inside one among the older colonial-era denominations.
“I don’t want my daughters to be forced to recite Anglican hymns and attend Scripture Union meetings every evening at an Anglican or Dutch Reformed boarding school,” said Ngomwa.
Secular private schools also broaden the choices for college students to excel in programs like sports, which open doors for university placement abroad; Ngomwa’s daughter’s athletic involvement got her a spot at a UK university.
Meanwhile, the standard of facilities and education in church-run schools is declining fast as old colonial churches get poorer, said pastor Ado Manake, a cleric with the Apostolic Faith Mission (AFM), a Black-founded, post-colonial Pentecostal Christian denomination that’s home to a number of the biggest congregations in Zimbabwe.
“New Black-owned evangelical and Pentecostal churches are forcefully difficult colonial Catholic, Presbyterian, or Anglican churches in Zimbabwe,” said Manake. “We are opening latest schools, making some nondenominational, and getting a lot of students, because we understand the brand new Black clientele.”
Over the past 20 years, secular private schools have dismantled the monopoly of old-church-run mission schools. They charge pricey sums like $1,000 per semester in primary or high schools, in comparison with church schools that were a combination of modest fee-paying students and people on scholarships .
Rusitu High School, situated in Zimbabwe’s far east province of Manicaland and established by American Baptists, had been a prestigious and popular option throughout the twentieth century. Today, it may well barely enroll 400, down from around 1,000 high schoolers at its peak. “We must accept times are changing—we used to draw students from all corners of Zimbabwe,” said Amos Gwade, the varsity’s treasurer.
There are still Christian options available: Some of the newer evangelical and Pentecostal schools proceed to include faith and doctrine within the curricula.
“In those schools, we ensure that students, be they highschool or college, are taught and prescribed key concepts like salvation through grace, not works, and miracles as a key manifestation of religion,” said Manake, of colleges run by AFM and similar traditions. “We don’t need to go all-secular in our schools.”
